Imagineer Systems Customer Profile: Gradient FX

Imagineer SystemsCustomer Profile: Gradient FX

Founded in 2006, Gradient FX is a multiple award-winning artist
and technology-driven VFX studio. Balancing the ideal blend of art
and technology, Gradient FX artfully mix their technological savvy
with high design and artistry to deliver unconventional, yet
visually stunning results for their clients. Gradient FX has
over 30 feature films under their belts - from arthouse indies to
global blockbuster films, as well as award-winning music videos,
television commercials and game cinematics.

Gradient FX has also
been mocha customer since version 1.0,
and have made it the primary go-to tool in their VFX kit. We
recently spoke with Thomas Tanenberger, co-founder of Gradient FX,
where he talked about mocha and its
growing role in the workflow for the artists at Gradient FX.

“It’s like an infrastructure tool for us now, our
Swiss army knife for just about any and every challenging sequence
we face,” Thomas added.

Thomas continued, “We
used mocha extensively on Friends with
Benefits. It’s a romantic comedy, so our ability to create
moods and cinematic ambience in post is critical.
And mocha plays such an important role
in scenes you’d never think would require a lot of work. In
one sequence, Timberlake and Mila Kunis are on a New York City
rooftop with the Empire State Building in the background. The
director wanted a clear night sky with twinkling stars behind the
actors. mocha made quick and easy work
of rotoing the actors so we could replace the skies behind them.
What would’ve taken hours, took only minutes.”

And with the ubiquity of smart phones and cell phones in our
lives, it’s impossible to make a film today without replacing
cell phone screens. In Friends with Benefits, so much of the
interaction between characters is smart phone use - calling and
texting constantly. And in a romantic comedy, it’s all part
of the chemistry, mood and timing that needs to be maintained in a
realistic way.

“Smart phones just don’t have the brightness and
clarity to shop up on the movie screen, so every single one of them
needs to be replaced. We
used mocha extensively for screen
replacement throughout the entire movie
- mocha makes it simple and fast and
incredibly accurate - realism is key!”

And many post houses can relate to when the directors asks for
what seems to be a simple request, can most often wreak havoc and
add multiple hours, if not days, to the project.

“One sequence that really stood out for us was the
restaurant scene, where the actors were dining al fresco on the
street. It was a big shot, with the camera starting with a wide
shot above the scene, craning down to narrow the focus onto the
character. The directors wanted the shot flipped. Seems easy,
right? Well, on a city street loaded with street signs, posters,
images, graphics, it’s suddenly not that simple. Everything
was inverted, any and every sign with a written word on it was
backwards and had to be changed. With mocha,
tracking, roto and stabilization working together beautifully, we
extracted all the signs, stabilized them and tracked it all back.
This would’ve taken days of tedium, but
with mocha, we made quick work of the
shot.”

Seamless workflow becomes increasingly important to shops like
Gradient FX; when time is of the essence and you have artists
working on impossible deadlines, the last thing you need is
integration issues between applications. Thomas added, “In
our workflow, mocha is often the
‘in between step.’ We do a lot of our work in Nuke, so
our ability to export seamlessly
from mocha to Nuke is
critical. mocha makes smooth work of
this. Feature film post production is heavily pipelined, and
teamwork is so important, so you also need tools that work
perfectly in synch with eachother.

mocha is very unique, without it, jobs
like this would’ve taken days or weeks longer. It may not
always be glamourous, but the tedium of manual frame-by-frame
manipulation can become overwhelming. But
with mocha central to our pipeline,
it’s a life saver. You can see why we’ve been with
mocha since day one!”

Gradient FX was also involved in the post production of
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 and 2,
Captain America, Dream House and The Change
Up.

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